Not that we can complain about any kind of Star Wars drought, in any area of the galaxy, but the news that EA have opted to cancel their open-world tour of the galaxy – a tweak of the cancelled 2017 Visceral Games project Ragtag – is regrettable, given the vast arena the game could have given us.
The project was codenamed ‘Orca’ and involved ‘a scoundrel or bounty hunter who could explore various open-world planets and work with different factions across the Star Wars universe’. Kotaku take a closer look at the situation.
But it wouldn’t be accurate to say that EA Vancouver’s Star Wars was the same game as Ragtag. When EA Vancouver took over, it rebooted this Star Wars project entirely, keeping some of the art assets but transforming it into an open-world game.
Now, that project is canceled, too. (EA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
EA had not shown any of EA Vancouver’s open-world Star Wars game publicly, but the publisher talked about it when it announced Visceral’s demise. “It has become clear that to deliver an experience that players will want to come back to and enjoy for a long time to come, we needed to pivot the design,” the company said at the time. “A development team from across EA Worldwide Studios will take over development of this game, led by a team from EA Vancouver that has already been working on the project.”
However, there may be hope for Orca. As the next wave of next gen consoles are heading our way over the next couple of years, the project may have been postponed rather than completely cancelled to make way for other, quicker products to come to market.
(T)hey cancelled Orca in favor of a smaller-scale Star Wars project that’s now aimed for much sooner—likely, late 2020. Some at the studio also hope that Orca might be restarted after this new project is finished.
